Opinions
Shopping Binges
Just when I am agonizing over a recent malady that stopped my walking exercise at dawn, I read this post by my dear friend Manny on my FB wall. Oh, those foolish, wondrous “that’s nice” days!
“No one but no one could hold a candle to the shopping duo of Grace and Amor*! Those two would tag-team amid a flutter of classy English, the un-pretentious kolehiya kind and I witnessed this somewhat weird ballet, this mad dash from the clothes racks to the fitting rooms & back again, first hand during a lull at a TVC shoot. The production house told us to leave for a while as the next set up would take at least three hours.
“’I could think of a million things to do in three hours,” said Amor. “Me too! Manny come with us,’ Grace piped in.
“We arrived at Rustan’s and I could see their eyes twinkling as they imagined the possibilities. Inside Amor would be her critique about which scarf goes with which blouse, while Grace, with her patented “that’s nice,” would quickly agree at Amor’s choice.
“It really depended on how Grace said this two-syllable phrase. If she said “that’s nice” with her eyes opening wider than usual, coupled with a bigger than usual smile, then buy the darn thing.
If she said it with panic in her eyes, her smile frozen midway, that was bad. You must quickly banish that sordid thing or hand it over to dis crass, new money hag with a ‘this would look good on you’ marching order.
“As usual I would be sitting on a couch. Unlike today, shops then cared about tired, unwilling husbands chained by the wrists, taken as prisoners and made to wait as Lady Godiva attacks the marketplace with nothing on but her wit and uncanny ability to mix n’ match clothing!
“Which of course I wasn’t like those husbands. I enjoyed watching them—in fact, their thought and selection process—that before you knew it we had been there for over five hours and they were far from finished with their shopping!
“Good thing in those days, before cellphones and iPads. I brought a paperback novel, the 300+ pages kind.”
Ahhh, the many seasons of grace!
“For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven . . . God has made everything beautiful for its own time.” Ecclesiastes 3: 1, 11 (NLT)
